Tag: Flash (Jay Garrick)

Twice a week I randomly generate two dates and then compare the titles I own from both of them, trying to find some covers that, with a little basic photoshopping, I can mash together, and then I force the results on you lovely people.

By the way, I admit to being HUGELY influenced by the wonderful Super-Team Family blog which has been doing this for years (and a lot better) on an almost daily basis.

Ah, the JSA – those were the days, eh?

For what it’s worth, with the JSA characters, I was trying to mimic the effect seen on Green Lantern #138 which is where I stole Eclipso from.

Back on my old blog, I ran a series of related posts on Mondays and I’ve been wanting to do something along those lines here.

So, and I admit to being HUGELY influenced by the wonderful Super-Team Family blog which has been doing this for years (and a lot better) on an almost daily basis, I’ve mashed up a few comic covers.

Each week I randomly generate two years and two months and then compare the titles I own from both those dates, trying to find some covers that, with a little basic photoshopping, I can mash together, and then I force the results on you lovely people.

This was an easy one – just pop the JSA behind the window frame and voila!

Didn’t realise until years later that the Scarab series was actually meant to be a Dr Fate mini-series but John Smith’s plans were so off the wall, DC nixed the idea and made him come up with Scarab . . . who ended up getting a couple of cameos in JSA a few years later.

Looking back at some old copies of Justice League America and Justice League Europe recently and I remembered the little pictures of characters that used to appear in the issue number box on DC comics back in the early 90s. Oddly, despite the larger membership at the time, the JLA only had two pairs:

JLE fared a little better:

and even managed to get a few more in after their revamp and new members:

I’d thought for a while that JLA/JLE were the only titles with those but a quick look through my collection turned up these from Green Lantern:

A couple from the Justice Society

(There was a Wildcat one but he was largely obscured by the cover art) as well as some odds and sods:

A little detail on the cover which always appealed to me for some reason.

I’ve just finished reading The Flash: Emergency Stop trade paperback from a few years ago which details Grant Morrison’s (and Mark Millar’s) first stories as writers of The Flash. There’s a lot of nice moments in there (not least of which is Jay Garrick accidentally losing the pen which contains Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt who would later show up in Morrison’s JLA – a lovely bit of foreshadowing, subtly done) but one thing that caught my eye was the following scene. Wally and Jay are having lunch in a very Planet Krypton-style restaurant with a heavily disguised Nightwing and Jay waxes lyrical about how times change:

This conversation comes from The Flash #134 from 1997 which ties in with Wally’s assertion that “the Dark Age only just ended in ’95”

If Wally (via Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books) is correct in the 20 year cycle of heroic ages, then we’re just coming out of the age that Wally mentions as having just started from his point of view which means the recent DC Rebirth is pretty much on time . . . and I can’t help thinking how apposite Jay’s words are even now when he says “We’ve been through the darkness. Now let’s see a little light.”

Of course, with everything that’s happened in comics in the last 20 years, you also have to wonder whether the Dark Age really did end in 1995.